Tony Kellogg, 28, and Katie Hanscom, 27, pour over some of their wedding planning materials in their Fairfield apartment on Monday, February 11, 2013. The couple are getting married after dating for four-and-a-half years. less

Tony Kellogg, 28, and Katie Hanscom, 27, pour over some of their wedding planning materials in their Fairfield apartment on Monday, February 11, 2013. The couple are getting married after dating for ... more

By the end of Katie Hanscom's and Tony Kellogg's first date, the couple was slow dancing in the rain along the Stamford waterfront in what Hanscom calls a "movie moment."

"We were walking on the pier and all of a sudden it started to rain, and with my girl's mentality, I was like, `Oh my God, I hope he kisses me. Please let it happen. Please let it happen,' " Hanscom recalls.

It happened.

"We were under a lamp post and we ended up kissing and we had to run under the cabanas, because the rain was coming down like sheets and sheets of rain. And I don't know why this happened, but we just started kind of slow dancing," she said, before letting out a giggle. "This totally blows his macho man spot."

It's been five years since that evening at the Crabshell restaurant in Stamford, and the couple has had countless movie moments since that first date, including the night Kellogg got down on one knee under the light of a blue moon in August. Now they're planning a wedding, set for May 2014.

"Well, she does a lot of the planning, and I shoot down her ideas," Kellogg joked Monday night as he pointed to Hanscom's wedding binder at their Fairfield home, brimming with photos of floral decorations, color swatches and ideas for photo shoots printed out from Pinterest.

Hanscom, who grew up in Greenwich, will be 28 when she walks down the aisle. Kellogg, who is originally from Stamford, will be 29, making the pair a little younger than most Connecticut couples who tie the knot.

A Hearst Connecticut Newspapers analysis of 4,399 marriages performed across eight southwestern Connecticut municipalities reveals that the median age for men upon their first marriage last year was 30, while the median age for women was 28. That's consistent with census data, which reveals that Connecticut men are the oldest in the nation upon reciting their vows, with a median age of 30.9; Connecticut women are the fourth oldest at 28.7 years old, trailing behind Washington, D.C., New York and Massachusetts.

Of the eight towns analyzed for Valentine's Day 2013 -- Stamford, Greenwich, Norwalk, Darien, Bridgeport, Fairfield, Bethel and Danbury -- Greenwich had the oldest grooms at age 31, while Darien had the oldest brides at age 30. Bethel and Danbury had the youngest brides at 27 and the youngest grooms at 29.

The national median ages, according to the last census, are 28.2 for a man and 26.1 for a woman. The state with the lowest median ages is Utah, at 23.3 for a bride and 25.5 for a groom.

In Fairfield, where Hanscom and Kellogg live, the median age for a bride in 2012 was 28, while the median age for a groom was 30.

"I feel like with our generation of people, this is normal, and I just never wanted to be that girl who was like, `I'm getting older. It's time to get married,' " Hanscom said. "I wanted to do it when it was right for us, and of course, getting married is really expensive, so I wanted to make sure that financially we felt comfortable where we were."

Among reasons cited for a national rise in marriage ages are the high cost for ceremonies and that more Americans are attending and graduating from college.

"It's pretty well accepted that people are waiting to get married until after they go to college, and such a larger share of people are going to college now," said Gretchen Livingston, senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank in Washington, D.C.

"Even in 1980, the shares of people going to college were much lower -- and so was the age for marriage," she said.

In 1980, around the time Hanscom's parents were married, the national median age for first-time grooms was 24.7, while the age for brides was 22, according to census data.

Michelle Serpe, who will say her vows at St. Cecilia's in Stamford on Saturday, knows the generational difference from personal experience. She and her fiance, whom she has been dating for four years, are both 30 years old; her parents were 19 when they were married.

"My parents were like, `What is going on? Why is this taking so long?' " Serpe said. "But it's not like I'm the only who's behind," she said, noting that she and her fiance, Doug Katz, are from large families, and most of their cousins are getting married at about the same time.

"Nowadays it really isn't until you're 29 or 30 that people are really thinking about it," she said.

She said she felt she needed time to develop a more mature understanding of love.

"I definitely think that had I met Doug even a year before I did, we probably wouldn't have worked. I was living alone, doing my own thing and I really just had no clue what it was that I really wanted. It took a couple of different relationships falling apart to realize what I was looking for," she said. "It's not that I wasn't ready before, it was that I was settling on things I shouldn't have been. But this time, it was either all or nothing; he's the right guy or not."

"And he was worth the wait," Serpe said.

Kellogg and Hanscom share a similar view. The couple was patient with their love right up to the moment the ring Kellogg painstakingly designed landed in his pocket.

"The second you get that thing, it's like, you want it off you. You just want her to have it," he said.

So while he originally planned to propose on a vacation to Aruba in early September, he pushed the evening up to Aug. 31, as the second full moon of the month lit the sky above Jennings Beach in Fairfield.

In the end, the couple found that a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of love is worth the wait.